Greg Bem

I am pleased to announce I have some new poetry published in Exacting Clam. The fourth edition of the print publication is available to learn about online and available to order in print.

I am also excited to see Thomas Walton’s work alongside.

A minimalist video with some not-so-minimalist auditory recording antics.

The sparks that come off the welding wand. It’s a blade, no, it’s a unnamed device in this spire of memory. Memorial. Conscripts dotting a geography of hallways and nightmares. Around each blowing curtain in the breeze, and I remember when the water wasn’t bruised and green. Binaural affectation. The Greeks had it correctly transcendental. Tracers of pings, the audibly bluish kind. Blowfish of splinters of sound, and I am unable to escape playgrounds of chemicals and their dependencies. On 22^nd, the Ring glows like a church tower in the electric neighborhood moonlight. On Massachusetts, nothing feels like New England. Blue Dog Pond where I can’t even begin to describe the trash, never leapt over the fence, never did, and maybe never will. To will the moan into being the moon covers up. What is the German word for the glare that blankets the tarred corners of the parking lot, illuminating the challenged shadow beings and luring them forward? It is calm here, so I do not know. I do not look up the information unless placed, unless snapped, unless the edging of mental faculties reiterates. This is not the time for patterns, but all times must confront them. We are subjected. Stimuli and nothing else, unless cold facts leave you wanting warmth, and then the house of cards falls apart, logic deconstructs, a discombobulation. I heard Russia had invaded, and I saw many news but no memes. I was subscribed to certain channels, listening to a certain band of voices, band of frequencies, tonal filtration system, filtering out the punks for the packs of the empathetic. It has been years since I heard your voice this fully, your wordless mouth coating my skull with a soft massage, like a slug gliding across the forest floor, the roughness disregarded. Closer to home I innumerate. How many bottles of Nalgene, how many bottles of childhood orange for pills? How many speakers, cables collecting dust like skins to be discarded, like snakes even? Snake skins? I saw a picture of a snake skin found in the desert. Questions about species, questions about identification. What is good and what is not good enough? Landscape of saguaro, perhaps attractive because it is so nowhere? Perhaps it is so outside that it is inside itself enough to be believably full? We arrive to make it full, our experience is the fullness, the sun is the fullness and the moon, and the lightning in between the cracks of vision. But it is winter and I dream of such places but they are like damnation to me, they are like some hellscape of the untouchable, because I am here and my roots are deep. Deep roots like cedar or hemlock, even like maple or alder. Yes, alder, my favorite. A very socialist tree. Like the crows, at sunset, flocking en masse to paradise, cloaked in shade. We all find our cloaks, and I can still remember the dream, cloaked in daylight of experience, from last night, where were on a boat, exploring forever, sequences of rooms, much like Titanic, but no tragedy, just endless, monotonously so, story. Perhaps that is its own tragedy. Perhaps that is its own blanket of truth. The balloons meanwhile are calling. They are releasing in my ears. They are the hum toward execution. Toward tinnitus. Which camp are you in? How do you pronounce it? The rat cards are calling. They pile themselves on top of each other, foaming from their two dimensional mouths. Keep on keeping on, the race is on, and they are piling. And they are boxing. Boxing in the corners, jamming along the algorithms. They are readying and sinking their teeth in. And it is never too late, because the ramping up is here, and the ramping down is here, and all is acceleration, the way the cold comes and keeps us, keeps us moving, it is nevertheless extraordinary and dull.